Those obsessed, growing provinces of Christianity

For the past forty years, an interesting experiment has taken place within the Catholic Church and in Protestant communities. The bulk of the dioceses and mainline Protestant sects have de-emphasized if not shed doctrines in favor of being more welcoming and relevant. I’m thinking here of dioceses like Cincinnati and Rochester and communities like the Episcopalians and Methodists. By any objective measure, the results have been disastrous. Indicators like vocations, weekly Mass or worship attendance, sacramental participation, or just raw numbers of members dropped sharply.

Serving as a counter-experiment, a smaller but significant number of dioceses and Christian communities have bucked the overall trend and emphasized doctrine without seeing it as repellent to the faithful. Here we think of dioceses like Denver, Charleston, and Lincoln, and communities like the evangelicals and Missouri Synod Lutherans. And by any objective measure the results have been favorable; the same indicators have held steady or trended upwards. It’s also at work on a local level; witness the success of parishes like St. Cecilia of Cincinnati’s Oakley neighborhood and Our Lady of Victory in Rochester, despite the character of their respective dioceses.

Sadly, this experiment hasn’t come to the attention of the Holy Father, for in a rambling 12,000-word article, it appears Pope Francis believes we haven’t de-emphasized doctrine enough:

“The church’s pastoral ministry cannot be obsessed with the transmission of a disjointed multitude of doctrines to be imposed insistently,” Francis said. “We have to find a new balance; otherwise even the moral edifice of the church is likely to fall like a house of cards, losing the freshness and fragrance of the Gospel.”

Rather, he said, the Catholic Church must be like a “field hospital after battle,” healing the wounds of its faithful and going out to find those who have been hurt, excluded or have fallen away.

“It is useless to ask a seriously injured person if he has high cholesterol and about the level of his blood sugars!” Francis said. “You have to heal his wounds. Then we can talk about everything else.”

“The church sometimes has locked itself up in small things, in small-minded rules,” he lamented. “The most important thing is the first proclamation: Jesus Christ has saved you. And the ministers of the church must be ministers of mercy above all.”

The admonition is likely to have sharp reverberations in the United States, where some bishops have already publicly voiced dismay that Francis hasn’t hammered home church teaching on abortion, contraception and homosexuality — areas of the culture wars where U.S. bishops often put themselves on the front lines.

Allen expected a mostly positive response from the world’s more than one billion Catholics to the pope’s call for a more welcoming church.

“It’s going to be seen in most quarters as an inspirational, kind of breath-of-fresh-air statement from a pope,” Allen told CBS Radio News.

Allen also said there would be some division of opinion within church hierarchy in reaction to the pope’s comments.

“I think there are going to be many Catholics who find this kind of language from a pope refreshing and encouraging, what they’ve been waiting for for a long time,” said Allen. “Others probably will be upset by it.”

U.S. bishops were also behind Benedict’s crackdown on American nuns, who were accused of letting doctrine take a backseat to their social justice work caring for the poor — precisely the priority that Francis is endorsing.

Just last week, Bishop Thomas Tobin of Providence, Rhode Island, said in an interview with his diocesan newspaper that he was “a little bit disappointed” that Francis hadn’t addressed abortion since being elected.

Francis acknowledged that he had been “reprimanded” for not speaking out on such issues. But he said he didn’t need to.

“We cannot insist only on issues related to abortion, gay marriage and the use of contraceptive methods. This is not possible,” he said. “The teaching of the church, for that matter, is clear and I am a son of the church, but it is not necessary to talk about these issues all the time.”

Share this:

Like this:

Related

15 Responses to “Those obsessed, growing provinces of Christianity”

If abortion, gay marriage (did he really legitimize it?) and contraception are likened to high cholesterol and diabetes, what are the “battle wounds?”

Ministers of mercy before ministers of truth? The most merciful thing a person can do is proclaim the truth. Without truth mercy is not part of the virtue of love (aka charity). It is part of the vice of license.

Does this pope actually have a clue as to what is preached from the pulpit on a weekly basis? I can count on one hand, the number of homilies I’ve heard in my 44 years of life, devoted to these topics, and even then it’s usually watered down in a “seamless garment” type homily.

The pope wants us to de-emphasize these topics? The American Church can check that off their to-do list.

Liberals are positively giddy over the Pope’s latest seeming retreat from Catholicism. You can hear it in the voices of NPR reporters, see it on Facebook memes, read it in excited newspaper articles. They perceive that, even if the Pope goes along with the Church’s immemorial teachings on these subjects, his heart just isn’t in it. They see his perfunctory opposition to their pet causes the same way they viewed Obama’s professed opposition to same-sex marriage in 2008, as reluctant and insincere.

You’re spot on, Ron. And the constant attempts by otherwise serious Catholics to blame the media for “spinning” his words is getting tiresome. This is a man who has spent decades dealing with the press, and there’s no reason to take his words at less than face value. Let’s be clear, this is a retreat from the Holy See’s three-decade focus on doctrine into the pew-emptying muddle you can find in dioceses throughout the United States. To cap it off, he has effectively thrown under the bus the brave bishops who have taken heat for speaking on the topics he now thinks should be shelved. What a shame.

FYI, at a certain Catholic high school attended by the children of a certain commenter on this blog, a young religion teacher ebulliently told her students today, after the bell had barely finished ringing for the start of class, that a welcome new era has just dawned in the Church, and that, with the Pope’s comments yesterday, the old, fuddy-duddy teachings about contraception, homosexuality, and all that were now officially going into that cupboard above the fridge, where we put the things that we don’t really use anymore.

As I mentioned at the CF blog, I (and I image many recent converts) have already experienced doctrinal de-emphasis: in RCIA. It was astounding how any hard teaching was kept out of the discussion as if the Church was esoteric. A convert who doesn’t have a reasonably comprehensive knowledge and acceptance of the doctrinal content of the Faith is being short-changed.

Note to the Francophiles and Jacobins among the commenting community: Use the word “Pharisee” disparagingly against your host or his guests, and your post will go down the memory hole. Surely there are other places where your cant is welcome.

It is the secular culture, not the Church, that is obsessed over the things the Pope is tired of hearing about.

He would rather talk about the message of the Creed, which he obviously sees as more important than anything else the Church teaches. But he can talk about Christ all he wants to; every secular news story about the Church, from now until doomsday, will still be prefaced and framed by blather about the role of women in the Church, the Church’s teachings on contraception, or its disapproval of divorce and homosexuality. Every question that reporters fling at bishops, cardinals, or the Pope himself will still be about the things that the Pope would rather not discuss.

In fact, the obsessing will now only worsen. Thanks to his own ill-advised comments, the questions he is tired of hearing will now be flung at him far more often and far more urgently. He has stirred up and intensified the very discussion he would evidently prefer to avoid.

I don’t think the Pope was talking primarily about the United States or Europe, first of all. He’s thinking more of the third world. I think it’s reasonable to assume that cardinals who meet regularly about the whole world have a better idea of what’s wrong throughout the whole world than we do. Second, I think our problems are OURS and we made them. The fact that we made it harder to be kind to people in an appropriate, informal way (working with people in irregular family situtations but upholding the norm of the stable, married family, for instance) by excusing and allowing all sorts of things in an official way (whether it’s not opposing laws that regularize immoral ways of life or actually trying to change church teaching to say that they are okay) is OUR problem. I don’t think the pope is recommending that at all. Ron Kozar’s post about what a teacher at a Catholic school said, for instance, is inexcusable. And third, while I think the pope is deaf to the way some of his words are perceived by a group, so are we. Whatever lack of moral guidance we get or don’t get from the Church (and yes, we get hardly any), the truth we fail to see is that people outside the Church really do have the fixed idea that we are mean, rule-bound, strict people who put certain issues before all others and don’t care about people. We are just deaf to that, because we know it’s not true. But they don’t. I think that’s the PR he’s trying to counter. Whether it will work is an open question, but it sure won’t work one way or another in less than a year! We’ve got to live with him for a quite a while before we find out the results of his words and actions, and let’s face it, it might take beyond our lifetimes to find that out. And fourth, anyone expecting the media to get more than 20% of ANYTHING about the Church correct is living in a dream world. THere is no way Pope Francis could express himself and have the New York Times get it right. The interview wasn’t for the major media, it was for US.

Gailf, I admire the charitable spirit and global perspective you bring. Some comments:

You say the Church is seen as strict and fussy about rules, and you’re right. But that is true of every religion that tells poor little Johnnie he can’t have a cookie. Every religion that says no to the many and ever-more varied sexual cravings of modern man, and means it, will forever be portrayed by the rule-hating, anti-religious media as mean, uptight, and pharisaic.

The only way to end that perception is to get rid of the rules. The Pope’s solution, by contrast, which is to quit talking about the rules, will only lead people in the pews to wonder whether the rules are still the rules.

The Pope is like a Republican presidential candidate: everything he says in the presence of others will be front-page news if it is the least bit infelicitous. Shame, of course, on the media for deliberately sowing confusion, and on all of us for listening (as you rightly observe) too casually. But shame, too, on the klutzy candidate, or Pope as the case may be, for providing so much confusion-fodder for the media to sow.